Source

That means it’s more important than ever to get yourself into that conversation and create content that your users want to engage with. By marketing with content you can reach potential customers while they are forming those critical opinions early in the sales cycle. This method is a great way to start investing slowly and methodically focusing on the kind of material that will drive conversions.

Get the right vision

Most of you are probably thinking about a certain number of conversions, traffic or links that would mean your content is a success but I would disagree. Instead I think you should define successful content as knowing how to regularly create content that will be an engine for growing your business. This is a lofty but worthwhile goal but having a finely tuned engine is REALLY powerful:

• Okcupid’s 23 post blog has over 4000 linking root domains.
• Salon.com saw a 40% increase in traffic by posting 33% fewer posts. That’s on over 7 million unique visitors.

Get the right metrics

This is step one, you need to choose the metrics you are going to look at to define your success. You want to avoid looking at the metrics that are going make you feel good about your progress and choose the ones that really matter. Then you need to stick with them. Great examples:

• Total number of repeat users who entered through the blog
• Number of 50+ Domain Authority root domains from within the content of a post
• Number of email signups per post

To do this you need to be able to validate that what you are doing is productive. In fact being able to validate what you are doing is driving you forward is significantly more important than how much you do.

Build a minimum viable product

The goal here is show that your content does in fact drive conversions for your business. Remember how we define success? Put traffic and conversions aside for the moment we are trying to concretely validate the process.

Step One: Create a squeeze page to collect email addresses offering the most cohesive vision for what your content should accomplish. This should be a streamlined concept for example a startup newsletter I’ve been reading did this well.

LaunchRock is a great tool to get this started immediately handling the email signups and analytics for you. Building this page took me all of 5 minutes. For a more involved page use a successful squeeze page like Code Year to model how your build yours.

Step Two: Build traffic to the page to test that people will actually want your content. Notice you haven’t actually had to write any content yet. So if your content idea is a failure all you have invested in one small webpage and the time and money it took you to drive traffic to the page. In grand scheme of trying to create a game breaking source of revenue for your business this is nothing. Consider the cost of creating multiple pieces of content that don’t actually drive sales, even worse the opportunity cost of pursuing faulty ideas for months or years. A few great ways to drive to traffic at your page:

• StumbleUpon paid discovery is a particularly effective method for these types of pages. It can be unreliable traffic but 500 users for $50 is nothing to sneeze at, strongly consider the $0.25 per user option.
• Facebook advertising is also a great match with the ability to slice by interests and demographics
• YouTube promoted videos are a bit of a tangent but it’s another great medium to run these tests. The last time I ran a campaign the video I was promoting got 60,000 views on a $2,000 budget over a two month period. That’s three cents per video view and by far the most attention you get per dollar spent.
• Share it on a relevant subreddit, Hackernews, Facebook and Twitter. Email people who have an interest in the topic. You already have your one sentence pitch so JFDI and find a way to get people to it.

Now that you have some traffic to the page is anyone signing up?

Step Three: Validate your idea is good enough that people will give you their email address. Get at least 100 visits from a variety of sources, what is your conversion percentage? If you get no signups use Five Second Test to flesh out any egregious problems with your landing page. If you didn’t get any signups then pat yourself on the back for saving an enormous amount of time and resources on faulty content. You only wrote one sentence, talk about failing efficiently. Start over and test a new idea.

Step Four: Create the content and start emailing your signups, in the spirit of lean and efficient I recommend a free service like MailChimp. The basic plan is to create:

• Two pieces of content both shorter than 1000 words
• One sales email
• One case study of customers using your product

I’m no email marketer but a few key points:

• Only send emails Monday through Friday
• Start by sending emails at 9am US eastern time (for United States)
• Send emails at least one day apart
• Use email templates that are smaller than 600px wide

A good rate for having your emails opened is about 20%-30% although it’s very possible to get higher percentages particularly with this method where users are being pre-qualified for interest.

Step Five: Measure your results for success the whole point is here to verify that you can indeed get someone interested in your conversion channel with content. Things you will want to track:

• Use bit.ly and Google Analytics tagging to see if anyone clicks links from your sales or case study emails
• Your goal is to get at least one person to click through

Make it even more efficient

• Use content that has already been written for your site or repurpose old content
• Write your content for one person who has a large audience, if they find it interesting it proves you can get a large audience
• Your tag line, your email subjects and introduction should deliver immediate satisfaction, this is not creative writing

Oh yea this %$#! works

• Dropbox got into Y Combinator with this video of a product that didn’t exist
• Skillshare just raised a $3.1 million Series A round launched with a single page website collecting email addresses
• Groupon launched by offering two for one pizza at a restaurant in their building

Be efficient

• Leverage already successful designs; remember the point is to be efficient with your time.
• Use beautiful high resolution images to get a beautiful result with the least amount of work. Shutterstock has a great library of stock images to use.

Image credit

Examples of successful squeeze pages

• Fab.com
• cloud:niche
• AppSumo
• Totsy
• Groupon
• Living Social

I haven’t taken a “real” break in a number of months (where I completely unplugged), so that’s what I’m doing right now at the Mountain Film Festival in Colorado. I’m mostly offline from Thursday afternoon to Wednesday.

I’ll be honest and say that I’ve hit a bit of writer’s block recently.  I’m really looking forward to this break so that I can come back fresh and do well for my clients and in my writing on this site.

But never fear! I have an excited guest post set up from my coworker Chris Warren though. I’m really looking forward to what he has to share with all of you, because he’s a really frickin smart dude and a great marketer.

See you next week!

Big search news: goo.gl/RTBCs Moving from keywords toward knowledge of real-world entities and their relationships.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 16, 2012

Google has been talking about entity search for a while, and a lot of talk has happened in the past few months, starting with this story on Mashable (of all places) and an interview with Amit Singhal of Google. In that interview, Amit said:

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.”

So basically, Google is changing the way search works. They are taking Schema.org markup, using their knowledge from social database Freebase which they bought in 2010, and other information sources to figure out what words mean, which eliminates a lot of guesswork that search engines currently have to do in order to return relevant results.

Away from Links

Links have been manipulated over and over, and even though updates have been rolled out to try to deal with this to an extent, and more seem to be rolling out daily even if unannounced, they’re still being manipulated. Google’s getting tougher on reinclusion requests from what I’ve seen as well (can’t share details unfortunately), and sometimes will partially revoke a penalty when they see that there are still some manipulative links pointed at it.

So now we get to Entity Search, which allows Google to learn if it’s a person, a team, or whatever that the search is intending to find. To see it explained quite well, here’s the video that Google released today in their announcement:

It’s even entitled “Things, Not Strings.”

How It Seems To Work

I am seeing it for a number of queries that I do. For example, when I search for [danny sullivan], I see both Danny of SearchEngineLand and Danny Sullivan the race car driver:

When I search for [nets], I get the Brooklyn Nets and a lot of information about that team:

Conspicuously absent, however, is any ecommerce for [basketball nets] or [hockey nets] or anything of that regard. To get those, you have to do a more exact search. We’re moving away from broad searches to more exact searches, it seems.

When I search for [joe gibbs], I don’t just get the Redskins coach, but I can also see entries for producer Joe Gibbs:

Here’s an interesting one. I searched for [samuel adams] because I’m drinking a Sam Adams as I write this. Here’s what I see:

But when I search for [sam adams], I get two more results too:

And sorry Mike King, they’re not showing you:

Only for People and Sports Right Now?

From my investigations, it seems like this Knowledge Graph is quite limited right now, mostly to people and sports. Some searches that I expected to return useful information, like when I search for [jeep], I get their Google+ page which we’ve been seeing for months:

It seems that most brands are not yet showing up yet. I see nothing for [jeep], [rei], [delta], [seomoz], or [inc].

I do see it for some TV shows, this one for [greys anatomy]:

And I found this interesting case, where I looked for the community where I lived in Switzerland for a while. I got the Massachusetts branch and photos:

And for [new york hotels]:

But they have a ways to go with [paris hotels]. No Google, I don’t want the Paris hotel in Vegas:

Report an Issue

It seems that Google does not have complete faith in their ability to glean the right information from websites at this point, so they are also asking users for help to report when information is wrong. Check out all of the information that I could report as wrong on the search for [danny sullivan]:

Of course, I had to report something as being wrong to see what happened (sorry Barry, I reported you), but this is all I saw, which is most unhelpful because I can’t even give any justification for why I reported it:

Is SEO Dead (Finally)?

Nah. SEO’s just getting started, y’all! We should not stop building links because of this. Rather, Google is moving towards entity search, and this will take a while, and links, in my opinion, will always matter at least somewhat. Google is just trying to better understand what people are looking for and serve them that directly.

Our jobs have just become more interesting though. I’m sure people will be trying to find ways to manipulate this soon (it’s what SEOs do, right?), but here are some things you should be moving towards in the future to help Google out (and I bet this helps with being recognized as a brand too):

• Google+. You have to be on there
• Schema markup
• Get a Wikipedia page if you can, apparently

What is interesting to me at this point is that the information being pulled is from Wikipedia. I expect to see Google+ content being used more often in the future (you didn’t think G+ was a social network, did you??).

But Amit did say (quote from the SearchEngineLand article):

“Wherever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it.”

I do want to reiterate that if you’ve been building brands and winning through content, you’re going to be fine. If you’ve been doing crap linkbuilding and SEO, then you’re probably going to be hurting if you can’t evolve, and quickly.

Other Good Posts

There have been some other really good posts written about entity search that you should read as well to understand it better:
Justin’s Entity Search Results
Dan Shure’s It’s Time To Stop Ignoring Entity Search
Bill’s Named Entity Detection in Queries

Isn’t this stuff exciting??

…[W]hat I didn’t realize at the time was how this relatively small sharing gesture would result in a significant surge in collaboration, implementation, and general advocacy on the part of this particular division. In fact, the amount of effort and emphasis that this group provided extended beyond SEO and into one of the other channels that I manage.

And the result has been obvious lift in ROI for both of these channels as well as a much stronger sense of rapport between my team and this parallel business group.

Being in New York City, I’ve had the fortune to be able to go work onsite with a few of my clients. This has afforded me to the opportunity to get to know all of the employees as friends (we’ve been working together for over 6 months now), which is a greatly underestimated competitive advantage when working with a consultant. Couple people who are motivated, talented, and smart with mentors who are experts in their fields, and all of a sudden you have a very formidable company pushing flywheels that are all pushing a larger company flywheel.

I’ve seen a lot of success with this one client in particular, increasing their organic traffic 3x in a few short months. But it’s not the numbers that I want to focus on, though they are relatively remarkable.

Through my times working onsite with them, I’ve been able to:

• Work closely with executives, who give the final approval;
• Directly influence content strategy;
• Directly influence hiring;
• Motivate the entire company to care about SEO through showing them the value of our work;
• Influence social media and other PR for SEO benefit.

I want to focus on the benefits of working onsite. We’ve had a push to do this more at Distilled. Paddy and I even gave a talk on it at our Distilled-a-thon because of the success we’ve seen through it. Here are a few examples of what has happened since I’ve been working onsite and built a relationship to the point of complete trust.

The CEO does Outreach

You’re going to think I am kidding, and I recognize that this is extremely rare, but it is something we should all be shooting for. Through building my relationship with the CEO, I’ve gotten him doing outreach to business partners in order to get links (through a smart widget embed). I would not be able to build these relationships with the level of people that he is reaching, but because he is the CEO and knows other CEOs, he’s done a phenomenal job of getting links from strong sites.

How – The CEO was already building relationships with other potential business partners, so it only made sense for him to be the one doing outreach while on calls with other businesses. I simply asked.

Hired a Guest Blogger

When I first started working with this company, I quickly realized that they are creating a new niche. Quite simply, there were very few directories to submit to, and we also realized that this was not going to move the needle (especially in a post-Panda world, and especially now a post-Penguin world).

You all know that I am a fan of content marketing  and cultural thought leadership, so I decided that they should instead seek to lead the way with content and establish a niche that way.

I didn’t have the bandwidth to do this with the budget we had, so we looked for ways to scale up content creation. Lo and behold, I came in one week and they had hired a dedicated content person to write guest posts. WIN! This guy has a journalism background and connections in the blogging world, and so he has been rocking it out for the past few months.

PR Training

This client has an incredible PR person working with them on a freelance basis. He has gotten them press coverage that anyone would be amazed at. But he wasn’t getting them links. In fact, he told me straight up that he did not like asking for links.

So what did I do? When Distilled’s internal PR capability was in town, she came by and met with him. In two hours, they had taught each other a lot – she had trained him on approaching journalists for links (including being willing to leave out links if pushed to get unnatural anchor text), and he had given her some ideas for ways that they could work together to get multiple companies PR coverage.

Influence Content and Blog Strategy

Through working onsite, I’ve also gained their trust when it comes to content. Through making friends with their content creation team and taking the time to get to know them, we’ve been able to first establish a blog and content strategy, and then iterate upon this strategy as the data has led.

We’ve iterated upon their blog strategy  three or four times, and one of these iterations led to their main blogger being allowed to work on the blog full-time like he desired instead of having to do other work. His work spoke for itself and I’m happy to have played a small part.

How

None of this would have been possible had I not gotten out of my comfortable office chair and gone to work onsite. Honestly, this project was starting to fall apart because I was not onsite working with them. Some clients need a bit more of a personal touch. I’d say the results here have been worth it:

If you’re a consultant, offer to meet them for lunch. Have a beer with them after work (a coworker and I did this with a large fashion brand, and getting buy-in since has been remarkably easier). Go work from their office once or twice a month (or every week if you have the budget). I promise you’ll see success, because you may get to:

* Work closely with executives, who give the final approval;
* Directly influence content strategy;
* Directly influence hiring;
* Motivate the entire company to care about SEO through showing them the value of your work;

Oh, and I know that the vast majority of you won’t actually do it. So if you do, you’ve got an advantage.

The choice is yours.

Most businesses, in my opinion, don’t understand the difference between old-school “marketing material” and the new school of online marketing – thought leadership materials and other remarkable pieces. This has led me to one conclusion:

Everyone wants a brand experience. No one wants a marketing experience.

No One Cares How Awesome You Are

In today’s Internet world, the currency is information or entertainment, and often information about entertainment. Unless you’re TMZ or some other publication like that, the entertainment side often won’t fly, so we become information providers and instructors, giving away content and thought leadership because that is what resonates with people. In fact, it is so difficult to become noticed for something that is done really well (sure, anyone can create a viral cat video, but is that going to help your plumbing company?) that I’ve had startup CEOs say to me “Man, it seems like we all need to become publishers!” And that is exactly the point.

If you provide enough value to people, they will pay whatever you ask them to!

From my experience, people who overly promote themselves, without adding value to others, do so because they have no idea about branding or what their branding message is. In short, they lack vision for their company, just like SEOs who overly optimize do so because the business is weak.

When you do this, your traffic and leads will probably go thus (a real example but I cannot tell you who):

Or you could invest in adding value to your users and your traffic might go like this:

Yep, that’s a 150% increase in a year. Not bad, especially when going from 900k/month already to over 2 million per month!

Towards Brand Marketing

The companies winning today (not necessarily in the SERPs at this point, though) are the companies that have found and embraced their brand voice and provide information and good content to their readers and customers. They create content that sets them apart and furthers their company vision, and they do so without promoting themselves. Their content promotes them enough because it sets them apart from their competitors.

I’m not trying to bang on about content. I did that here. It’s just that the argument about not being able to create good quality thought-leadership style content doesn’t fly. This argument only arises when thinking fails to go outside the box.

Vision

A brand is built through a vision. Take Zappos for example. Tony Hsieh, the CEO and founder of Zappos, had this to say about Zappos’ vision:

“At Zappos, our higher purpose is delivering happiness,” said Hsieh. “Whether it’s the happiness our customers receive when they get a new pair of shoes or the perfect piece of clothing, or the happiness they get when dealing with a friendly customer rep over the phone, or the happiness our employees feel about being a part of a culture that celebrates their individuality, these are all ways we bring happiness to people’s lives.”

Coca Cola is declaring their new mission (or vision) as:

Our Roadmap starts with our mission, which is enduring. It declares our purpose as a company and serves as the standard against which we weigh our actions and decisions.

• To refresh the world…
• To inspire moments of optimism and happiness…
• To create value and make a difference.

SEOmoz’s vision is wrapped up in the TAGFEE code:

Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, Exceptional

Creative Content Creation

Content creation that drives a brand voice involves creativity. Often this content is crowd-sourced to an extent, guided by the company’s vision as talked about above, which enables the company to dominate the industry faster.

Lifestyle or Industry-Wide Companies

Companies that span an industry or lifestyle have many opportunities.

SEOmoz, for example, spans SEO and is starting to cover more inbound marketing, so creating content like The Beginner’s Guide to SEO makes sense:1

Hubspot (inbound marketing) does something very similar with their Internet Marketing eBooks, and they have almost 400 presentations on Slideshare:

Mailchimp (email marketing) has created resources around email marketing, as well as useful help guides for their users:

RedBull (energy drinks and action sports) has created a lifestyle company by allowing and encouraging its users to send in their own content, as well as publishing action sports content to its Youtube page, where they have over 276 million video views:

GoPro is doing this on their site (which is really what RedBull should be doing):

Small or Local Business

If you are a small local business, you have opportunities at your fingertips that the larger corporations do not. By engaging in the local community and building goodwill with those around you, you begin to separate yourself from the pack. Think about events that require you to create content, such as meetups. Put on a local informational meetup (for whatever your business is about), create a quality slidedeck for it, give the presentation and get people to follow you on the different social networks where you are engaging, and then upload the presentation both to your personal website and Slideshare.

An online example is DollarShaveClub:

Local companies doing it right socially include Luke’s Lobster in NYC:

And Cupcake Royale in Seattle:

Make that content work for you!

Developing a Brand Voice Strategy

A brand voice strategy is formed by the following:

• A brainstorm (idea doesn’t have to be perfect);
• Ship a strategy by planning out content for 3 months and delivering it;
• Iterate once you have seen what traffic is doing (are people engaging?)
• Ship (ship the adjustments, keep iterating)

Visualize it this way:

Every company needs a vision and a voice, but finding that vision is undeniably the hardest part. The great secret about branding, though, is that you don’t have to get it “right” from the beginning. The most important, and undeniably hardest, part is the start. You have to define it as well as you can and then go. After all, your culture, brand, and voice will probably look quite different when you are a 3 person team than when you grow to a 30 person team, but your brand voice will naturally change as culture changes anyway. A brand voice is never static, so all you need to do is start.

Developing a brand voice strategy is an exercise in wide-scale introspection and focus. The goal of the brand voice is not only to provide focus and direction for the company, but also to attract th right people to the company to help further that voice.

Plan out a schedule for producing content as early as possible. Create an editorial calendar that has you producing content regularly. Remember, your first few pieces will not usually do well, so you need to keep pushing through and establishing yourself in your space. Success is not usually a consideration of who is first to market, but rather who is able to maintain that momentum and turn it into future success as well. Ship it and keep shipping. And track it so you can adjust.

Commit, Ship, Iterate

Now that you have had some time to introspect, ship something. If you decided that knowledge guides might be a good idea, create a quality guide and publish it. Outreach to people and get feedback. Then iterate. Do it differently next time if you need to. The goal is not to be perfect, but to be working towards a steady voice.

Brian Clark over at Entreproducer recently wrote an article about content marketing and how the process goes. He said it so eloquently that he deserves quoting here:

[A]gile content marketing follows the same 3-step process:

1. Start with an educated guess for a content approach
2. Release content knowing it’s likely flawed
3. Optimize constantly based on feedback

If you follow this thought pattern, eventually something will hit and resonate. Then, do more of that. Keep creating content related to your company and your industry without promoting yourself too much.

Rewards

The rewards of finding a brand voice, and using this as a powerful driver for new business as opposed to other outbound forms such as calling and “interruptions marketing”, speak for themselves. Hubspot did a whitepaper about inbound marketing, which shows this disparity between cost-per-lead for inbound vs outbound marketing:

Not only that, but you will also consistently receive more traffic. At Distilled we spend very little on first-touch client acquisition, but we do try to continually produce great content. So our traffic has gone from about 5,000 visitors a week at the beginning of 2011 to 15,000+ last week. And we’re a consulting company!

What kind of company do you want to be? The thought leadership makes sense. The costs make sense.

The choice is up to you.

Because of this I was happy when Feuza Reis, a New Jersey wedding photographer, asked to interview me for a video blog that she has been doing on her site. I agreed and so we had a great 30 minute chat about SEO and photography. Have a listen and I’d love to have your feedback!

A Few More Tips

There were a few tips that I did not get a chance to put into the interview. Some of these are basic to professional SEOs, but that does not make them any less important.

Put Your Blog on Your Site

I’ve seen countless professional photographers put their blog and content they create on a separate domain from their “business” site. Don’t do this. If you want to rank for more terms, both competitively and quantitatively, have your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so that any content you create and get links to will benefit the strength of your overall site.

Of course, before this comes the fact that you need a content strategy. Many of you are doing this well, by posting photos of your shoots. Keep doing this.

Share Your Content

SEO can be super important for your photography business, especially when targeting a local area. [your city + location] can often be an awesome keyword for you, or [your city + wedding photography]. Use this on your homepage and get some targeted links from other content. To get a start on learning how links to your site affect your rankings, check out the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

Connect With Other Photographers

Photographers have a lot in common with SEOs – you’re almost all friendly people who get along well. We’re done with the old days of “trade secrets”, so share your knowledge with others and share it on their sites as well. Do guest posts in order to get both links back to your site and also referrals from your friends. You can find a lot of photographers on Google+ (try this query) as well to get some airtime for your shots.

Big Images Win

Don’t put small photos on your site. Instead, use large images that draw in the eye and make you go WOW. Also, these large images have been shown to increase the linkability of your pages.

My friend Jordan does a great job of this on her photo blog (which isn’t connect to her main site. Sad face):

The Atlantic’s InFocus section is an example of this too (and you should try to get your photos featured there too).

Highlight Your Strengths

Get on photography forums and answers questions (and create content around those questions on your own site so that you can link back to your site). Make friends. Use unique and descriptive text for your ALT tags on your images. Become a member of photography sites and complete your profiles (and if there’s an opportunity for a link back, take it). Put your photos out there under creative commons, and require a link back to your site for using them. Go get those links!

All of that is well and good, but it does us no good if we don’t know how to create an editorial calendar for content creation. So let’s examine some tools that can help us do that. Just like a lot of processes that we think “Man, I wish I had a tool for that”, sometimes you need to try a few to figure out which one works best for you. These should get you started.

Shared Google Calendar

One of the easiest way to have an editorial calendar is simply with a shared calender in your Google Apps account. We do this with Distilled and call it out “Content Publishing Calendar”. Here’s how it looks (told you super simple is okay!)

Seriously, it’s that simple. All I do is email out the schedule for that week and the next each Monday, so that people have a couple weeks of heads-up on when they have a post due. We can also put bigger pieces of content on here (such as guides like the Linkbait Guide).  Also, every person in the company can see this at any time by adding it to their calendar.

I would be remiss to not mention Rob Ousbey’s post about creating a content calendar for marketing, wherein he lists out a lot of holidays that you should put on the calendar ahead of time and plan for (in case you can create content around them).

Pro tip – I think you can do this in Outlook as well. If you’re on Lotus Notes…well, you need a new email program.

Excel

If you’re a one-person shop, or you need a relatively easy way to keep track of the editorial calendar for each of your clients, you could try using Excel. Michael Hyatt has created an annual time block (go to that link to download the sheet) calendar that he uses to block off certain days, such as holidays or when not to travel. You could easily take this and make it an editorial calendar to use for days that you are to publish posts, complete with the blog post title. If you include all the important holidays from Rob’s post, you can use it for planning good timely content relatively far out!

Here’s a screenshot of how I’ve edited his sheet:

EditFlow

I’ve mentioned EditFlow before, and I will mention it again because it is an awesome workflow management tool for WordPress installs where you have multiple users writing and you also want to keep editorial control (which you should to keep content quality high).

You should also know that EditFlow has a calendar that you can use for planning out your content publication schedule. Once again, you can choose who can see and edit the calendar, thus keeping its integrity intact.

Other Tools

Like I said, there are many other tools out there that can help you manage your editorial workflow. You could use Basecamp, a shared spreadsheet in Google Docs, a tool like Producteev, or a task manager like Asana. Just find what works for you and the size of your team.

Additional Resources

I want to point you to a few more resources that I recommend reading when creating an editorial calendar for the first time.

First, this post from ContentMarketingInstitute about managing an editorial calendar does a phenomenal job of both helping you create the calendar as well as helping you think about what resources you need to make content creation happen.

Second, read this post on ProBlogger where he not only gets into organization, but also idea generation.

Finally, you should read Rob’s creating a content calendar and Tom’s the time for content marketing is now if you have not already.

I’d love to hear how you manage your editorial calendar, or if you have any ideas about how I could manage mine better. I try to blog twice a week, and I think that consistency is important. In fact, when you look at my blog traffic, the days my traffic is highest is the days that I publish content (not a surprise). Check it out:

What are you waiting for? Go create an editorial calendar now!

I want to highlight something I saw today that angered me, and make a bid for all of us to be good Internet citizens and police the places that we see that deserve to be kept clean. Just like it is – I think – our responsibility to pick up trash around our neighborhoods and not put gum underneath chairs for others to put their fingers in, it is also our responsibility to clear out spam when we see it so that the Internet stays, for the most part, an inviting place to be.

Let me show you an example.

Albino Killer Whales

Today I was on my iPad, flipping through Flipboard like I do each morning while drinking coffee. While browsing through FlipPhotos, which shows amazing shots from around the world, I came across a photo from National Geographic about a potential albino killer whale. I’m not oceanographer, but this seemed pretty cool and it was an amazing photo, so I clicked through to read the article, which you can see a screenshot of here:

I read the article, which was pretty interesting even though the title was a bit of clickbait. I read to the very bottom and then scrolled down a bit to see what was happening below the article. Much to my chagrine, I saw this:

Right. Awesome. Thanks bgvfdusa8. Free shipping and Nike Shox have so much to do with albino killer whales, as do those links to your site.

I’m not trying to out anyone here – and I won’t link to the plethora of anti-outing people who have publicly outed people – but this kind of thing simply has no place on the Internet, in my opinion.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that we should all disable comments, though (link 1) good arguments (link 2) have been made (link 3) to that effect. Instead, I want to call for a higher degree of activism online when it comes to spam. Algorithms and programs are not perfect, and therefore spam will still exist until Internet citizens – that includes you – rise up and police the web ourselves, deleting or flagging comments when they are obviously spam.

Part of being a good Internet citizen is also allowing free speech, of course. So I plead with you to not mark worthwhile comments that happen to be counter your beliefs as spam, but rather to engage with the discussions and points made. With great power comes great responsibility, but I tend to think that humans are relatively good and decent.

So mark blog spam as what it is – spam. Mark Twitter DM or Mention spam as what it is – spam. Let’s not get into a “what is spam” conversation (UrbanDictionary has the best definition I’ve ever seen), as that is ultimately futile. I think we all know what spam is when we see it.

Let’s make the Internet a better place for all.

The tools I used were:

Competitor linkbuilding analysis dream team – OSE + Majestic + LinkDetective + Excel = #win.

— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) April 21, 2012

Find Your Competitors with a Few Queries and Excel

If you work in-house, you should already know who your competitors are. In fact, you should also be differentiating between who your business competitors are and who your SERP competitors are, and they may not be the same.

There are a few ways to discover who your SERP competitors are. I used to use this spreadsheet tool from Tom Anthony, but unfortunately it’s broken. So what I do now is instead of doing it automatically with the spreadsheet, I run the same keywords, grab them with Linkclump, and dump them into an Excel spreadsheet. From there, I use a Pivot table and count the number of times the the unique domain showed up in the search results.

Like so:

A super simple Pivot Table later, and we get a look at who is showing up multiple times for these keywords that we care about. Sort by number of occurences of the clean domain, and you have your SERP competitor list.

Compare in Majestic for Backlink Discovery

I then use the MajesticSEO Backlink History comparison report, which is extremely useful if you have a Majestic subscription (which I recommend). To get to the report, click on the “Backlink History” option on the top navigation when you are logged in. Then enter your website, or your client’s, and their competitors.

For example, if I was going to look at what other SEO agencies are doing (I have no reason to do this, but it’s a good example), I’d run the comparison and get a report like this:

If you have a list of 8-10 competitors, run this report a few times and see which sites are gaining links, relative to yours, quickly. These are the sites to dig into further.

Especially look for the hotspots where someone spiked. If it’s in the past 30 days, that’s even better as you know that they have been building links recently and you can comb through those links.

Download links from OpenSiteExplorer

The next step is super simple. Run the sites in OpenSiteExplorer and download their links into CSV format.

Process links in LinkDetective

Next, use Eppie’s awesome tool, Link Detective, to get a look at what kinds of links your competitor has. I like to uncheck “Dead” and “Unknown” so that I can then tell which types of links that we can figure out without spot-checking are really there. From this quick look, you can narrow down even further if the site is worth digging into more. If a competitor has a directory-heavy link profile, this is good to know but does not take much investigation beyond pulling those directories out of the backlink profile and seeing if they are worth your time to pursue.

Here is an example backlink profile that you may see from LinkDetective (this is not the backlink profile of any of the sites compared above):

Of course, rinse and repeat as needed. LinkDetective normally takes about 20 minutes to return me a report, depending on the number of links I upload, so I try to get a good combination of exporting from OpenSiteExplorer and uploading to LinkDetective going to speed up the process.

Export to Excel and Find Patterns

Now that you’ve gotten a quick visual look at how your competitor sites are building links, export the CSV from LinkDetective and open it in Excel. I like to turn this report into a table (Select all the rows, CTRL+L on a PC) then so that I can sort alphabetically and narrow down to the specific types of links that I know the site is getting. Usually, a pattern or industry of site will start to appear as you look down through these.

For example, maybe your competitor is using local real estate companies to build links, and you are not. This is good to know. Or maybe you legitimately are being beat because obuyf directories, so you need to do this to compete. Once again, good to know.

You can also find this by creating a Pivot Table once again based off the data you export from LinkDetective. This way, you can slice the data to show you the type of link and the anchor text. Does the competitor have a lot of exact match anchor text in sidebars? They might be buying links. What about a lot of article links? Look for the guest blog footprint by doing searches like “guest blog” “(anchor text”.

Of course, you can always use other tools with your known competitors to find who is linking to more than one of them, but not to you. I recommend SEOmoz’s Competitive Link Finder or Majestic’s Clique Hunter, or if you want an idea about how to do this in Excel, go on over here.

I’d love to know how you make this competitive research process more scaleable as well. Some of it will always be manual, such as looking for the patterns within the URLs, but what other strategies do you use to find what your competitors are up to?

I think this is the wrong way to look at linkbuilding. At the very least, it’s shortsighted and doesn’t give you the full impact that thinking about linkbuilding in a different way could. I call this type of linkbuilding linkbranding.

Since I came up with the term linkbranding, I’m also responsible for coming up with the definition, right? So here’s my attempt:

Linkbranding is focused on acquiring links from high-quality sites that have attracted your ideal audience. These links will not only become stronger by virtue of being a linkable asset for that site, but will also gain social mentions and will pass referral traffic. The goal of linkbranding is to use other websites to brand yourself as a thought leader.

From Link Recommendation to Link Collaboration

In linkbuilding up to now, links have been counted as votes and thus recommendations by other websites. This still exists, but does not necessarily further your brand. Sure, your company may then be seen as being affiliated with, or vouched for by, the other website, but it is a more passive recommendation. Here, I am really talking about sidebar links and mentions on links pages.

Linkbuilding today has changed. We are moving away from link-begging, asking for someone to recommend us, and towards link acquisition of a different kind, which seems to involve more work (as you are creating high-quality materials, either on your site or as a guest article on another site), but when we take a look at the amount of time put into begging for links and the amount of time put into creating content that could receive a high return, I think the content is a better investment.

So we move away from this passive link recommendation mindset to a more active link collaboration mindset. With the goal of this content being to build not only a link to your site, but also to be shared wider and to help the website where the content was placed to get more traffic, what we end up doing is effectively co-marketing the content together. Both parties win.

And, since this high-quality content often must be pitched, actively agreed upon by the two parties, and vouched for socially, it is normally thought leadership content that the target site is hosting, thus allowing you to build your brand based off of their audience.

The Shift

I began thinking about this because the SEO industry is growing up and we are maturing into veritable marketers. We are beginning to care about personas, about brand message, and about our audience once they hit the website. We’re concerned about the search engine bots and organic traffic still (those are measurements of the success of our work), but we are no longer limited to that.

The Linkbranding Process

The linkbranding process will differ slightly from the typical guest posting or content creation/placement in that we start from a different place. Instead of simply thinking

“Where can I get a link from?”,

we ask

“Where does my audience hang out online?”

Personas and Brainstorming

We start by building our company’s customer personas. Once we think about who our best customer is, then we must brainstorm the kind of content that they enjoy. Can we create that? Ideally, we are thinking how we can attract these customers to our site.

Brainstorming also involves thinking about, or finding out, where our customers hang out online. Of course, you can use tools like Facebook Insights to see who is looking at your page and then do an analysis of their profiles if you can to see what else they might be interested in. Or, come up with a list of websites where you think they hang out, then go research and qualify these potential prospects.

Qualify Prospects

Linkbranding qualification is more complicated than simple linkbuilding qualifying. In typical linkbuilding, we look at:

• The strength of the site;
• The strength of the page we want a link from (if applicable);
• Can we get anchor text;
• Have they linked to sites like mine before;

With linkbranding, we still take all of this into account (ultimately we’re about links, right?), but now we also have to qualify:

• The site’s community and possibility for engaged new users;
• Get an idea for their traffic stats (something like SearchMetrics Essentials will show you their SERP visibility over time);
• Qualify their social channels and the chance for amplification through those.

The first one to qualify is their Twitter account. First, you must find the Twitter account. You can do this manually, by going to the site and searching for a button, or simply input the site below and click the “Go!” button. It will open the Top Domains tab for that site in OpenSiteExplorer. One of the top should be Twitter if they have one.

Use this URL: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=SITE%2F

To find the number of Facebook likes (hence the popularity of their site), use this: https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=website.com

Those should get you started.

Acquire

Finally, we set out to acquire the link in the same way we have done so before, by building a relationship, getting the idea approved or the pitch accepted, and then helping push the content live. The one key difference with linkbranding is that you should ask your point of contact if they would be willing to share the article out over their social channels. Most people are not adverse to this, but something they don’t even think about it! Simply asking them nicely will get you a long ways.

What do you think of this idea of linkbranding? Is it a bunch of hot air, or does it seem viable? I’d love to hear your thoughts.